The app keeps count.
Four hundred sixty-one thousand, eight hundred forty-four words.
Spoken, not typed. That is what Wispr Flow says I have said out loud since the first week of January.
Seems like I have a lot to say even when no other person is in the room.
Thirty posts have come out of that.
Call it twenty thousand words that made it here.
Twenty-three to one.
Before anyone does that math on my behalf, most of those words had nothing to do with this blog.
They were spoken across every application I use.
Work problems.
Messages.
Things I was trying to get straight in my own head at five in the morning before anyone needed anything from me.
So it is not a writing number.
It is a thinking number.
Some mundane. Some profound.
At least based on my personal scorecard.
In April I wrote that the conversation that never stops finally had somewhere to go.
A week later I mentioned, almost in passing, that I was doing it out loud.
In June I tried to explain why it works.
I never showed you the meter.
I did not know one was running until the app told me.
Thirty-six weeks of talking.
This blog started about seven weeks into that.
I cannot tell you which morning I stopped typing to think and started speaking instead.
It happened somewhere in there, and I didn't notice.
The tool is rented.
If Wispr disappeared on Thursday, I would have something else running by Friday.
What is mine is the habit underneath it.
Say the thing out loud.
Work it against something.
Keep whatever survives.
The useful moment is usually not the good answer.
It is the slightly wrong one.
Something comes back not quite right, and I hear myself correcting it, and the correction is the first time I know what I actually meant.
Which leaves four hundred forty thousand words nobody will ever read.
Including me.
They were not drafts. Drafts get saved. These got spent.
The cutting room floor. The crumpled-up Post-it notes.
The meter does not know the difference between a sentence that became a post and a sentence that only got me unstuck on a Tuesday.
It counts them the same.
Nine months ago, I would have told you I did not have a process.
I had one.
I did not see it.